Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Monday, May 02, 2016

In the Age of Trump Is America Ripe for Tyranny?

As I have noted before, I was a history major in college and have continued to read many historical works over the intervening years. One of my favorite periods is Classical Greece which gave rise to the concept of democracy. However, if one knows the history of Greece in this time period and Athens in particular, government rule whip sawed back and forth between democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. The latter episodes often occurred after the democrats fell prey to demagogues who seized the moment and their ability to sway the masses to put themselves in power. Sometimes these tyrants were benevolent, but more often than not, they were not. In a very long piece in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan has a piece that argues that America is potentially ripe to fall prey to a demagogue/tyrant much in the way that Athens did on more than one occasion. Needless to say, Sullivan sees Donald Trump as the greatest threat, but he also has fears of what Bernie Sanders is seeking to unleash on the left. Ironically, Sullivan sees Hillary Clinton - who he despises - as the possible bulwark against the fascism that Trump personifies. He also has a wake up call to Berniacs. Here are lengthy article highlights (I hope readers will read the entire piece and share their thoughts):

As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps
being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has
unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate
school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his
friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they
change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates
seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably
established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by
that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal
freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are
filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more
democratic it would become. . . . But it is inherently unstable.
. . . And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues,
that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the
time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and
sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He
makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his
wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking
the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class —
and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease
him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut
through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering
the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from
democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to
excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” —
and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the
democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised
elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy
willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

[A]s I watched frenzied Trump rallies on C-SPAN in the
spring, and saw him lay waste to far more qualified political peers in the
debates by simply calling them names, the nausea turned to dread. And when he
seemed to condone physical violence as a response to political disagreement,
alarm bells started to ring in my head. Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my
mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic danger of late-democratic life. It
was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our
own hyper-democratic times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character
plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.

Could it be that the Donald has emerged from the populist circuses of pro wrestling
and New York City tabloids, via reality television and Twitter, to prove not
just Plato but also James Madison right, that democracies “have ever been
spectacles of turbulence and contention … and have in general been as short in
their lives as they have been violent in their deaths”? Is he testing
democracy’s singular weakness — its susceptibility to the demagogue — by
blasting through the firewalls we once had in place to prevent such a person
from seizing power? Or am I overreacting?

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the
fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy
from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed
large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.
Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were
not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose
representatives were selected by the various states, often through state
legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was
designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of
office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and
restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the
president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any
democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the
Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy
firewalls against democratic wildfires.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or
abolished. . . . In 1940,
Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the
Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and
boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be
under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D.
Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have
proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman
Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald
J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to
being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now
almost complete.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our
president, are now almost nonexistent. . . . . . And this year, the delegate
system established by our political parties is also under assault. Trump has
argued that the candidate with the most votes should get the Republican
nomination, regardless of the rules in place. It now looks as if he won’t even
need to win that argument — that he’ll bank enough delegates to secure the
nomination uncontested — but he’s won it anyway. Fully half of Americans now
believe the traditional nominating system is rigged.

Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to
California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it
bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a
largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth
uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists.
Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also
explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling
Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct
democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on
American politics.

But it is precisely because of the great accomplishments
of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique
vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a
shameless demagogue.
And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders
feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than
reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal,
emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s
only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a
reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as
indispensable to a functioning republic.

Yes,occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically
fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or
valid or relevant.

We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of
facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of
politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive
the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

In Eric Hoffer’s

classic 1951 tract,The True
Believer, he sketches the
dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe
in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially
now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements
in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or
resignation — but frustration simmering with rage.
The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not
hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able
to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the
kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of
their low and stagnant wages.

The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the
church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation
more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more
relentlessly than almost any other segment of societyFor the white working class, having had their morals roundly
mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects
decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk
about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This
is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political
correctness” run amok, . . . .

Much
of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as
allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby
condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom
rung of the culture as well. And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was
part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of
racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the
white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended
this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization.

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility
for make-believe . . . . But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the
thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is
always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible
and comprehensive of all unifying elements.” And soTrump launched
his campaignby
calling undocumented Mexican immigrants a population largely of rapists and
murderers. He moved on to Muslims, both at home and abroad. He has now added to
these enemies — with sly brilliance — the Republican Establishment itself.

And
what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with
far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his
response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to
round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the
typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately
recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and
military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he
emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the
Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any
juncture.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had,
in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks.
But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its
hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new
Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult,
and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore
relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current
moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver
Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the
unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most
recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s
coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyper-democracy leads the stumbling,
frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what
one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump
is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough,
he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the
people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional
Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost
sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone
dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict
on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the
face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come
this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way.

Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his
supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for
serious civil unrest. . . . Torture and murder enough terrorists and
they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn
by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a
wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy
within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a
rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that
he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

Those who believethat Trump’s ugly,
thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me
to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by
persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement
based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly
exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore
the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a
terror attack in a major city in the months before November. . . . . Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s
greatest ally.

It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer
an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal
immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness.
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the
breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend
over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced
he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political
process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage
state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout.

And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a
Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and
understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan
Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing
the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique
of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that
with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to
Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since
her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans
find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the
threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of
identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that
experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the
anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.

More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing
rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our
passionate support, not our disdain. This is not the moment to remind them that
they partly brought this on themselves. This is a moment to offer solidarity,
especially as the odds are increasingly stacked against them.
They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity,
unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice
one election in order to save their party and their country.

For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television
spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just
another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as
all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order,
Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him
as such.

Some will say that Sullivan is over reaction. Having read extensively on the rise of Hitler and how the German people were manipulated to rally to Hitler, Americans need to understand that what happened in Germany (i) did not happen over night, and (ii) it was powered by rage akin to that which were now see on display among Trump supporters.

Translate This Page

Contact Me to Order Title Work

LGBT Legal Services

About Me

Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

Disclaimer on Opinions and Content

This Blog contains content that may be innapropriate for readers under the legal age of 18. IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE, PLEASE LEAVE NOW. Thank you

This is an opinion and commentary blog and the opinions and contents of this Blog - including opinions expressed concerning opponents of LGBT equality - are the opinions only of the individual blogger and should not be attributed to any other individuals or to any organization of which the blogger is a past or current member.

Followers

PLU Top Gay Blogs

Michael-in-Norfolk disclaims any and all responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, reliability, operability, or availability of information or material displayed on this site and does not claim credit for any images or articles featured on this site, unless otherwise noted. All visual content is copyrighted to it's respectful owners. Information on this site may contain errors or inaccuracies, and Michael-in-Norfolk does not make warranty as to the correctness or reliability of the site's content. If you own rights to any of the images or articles, and do not wish them to appear on this site, please contact Michael-in-Norfolk via e-mail and they will be promptly removed. Michael-in-Norfolk contains links to other Internet sites. These links are provided solely as a convenience and are not endorsements of any products or services in such sites, and no information or content in such site has been endorsed or approved by this blog.